the end of writing

Eventually, the intellectual and technological elite, which includes me, and you also, is going to have the same arguments about writing as we are now having about reading.
People will shift away from keyboards to produce written words. We’ll speak into microphones, at first clumsily and eventually efficiently with our own individual shorthands. Words commonly [...]

vault on demand

i’m contemplating the fact that print-on-demand and “the disney vault” both exist. that is, even if you can have any cultural artifact reproduced, and for sale, on short notice, it doesn’t mean that the rightsholders will agree to let you purchase it, for any price.

reading list

A post a few weeks back by Rory Litwin at the Library Juice blog asked,
What is the coolest library/info related book or article (or blog post, I guess) that you have read in the past year or so? Post something in the comments here – I am hoping we end up with a nice, [...]

stop talking about filtering content

Last week the Supreme Court of Washington, the state, not the district ruled that it was ok for a library to user filtering software on its public computers.
The problem was that the North Central Regional Library District filtered things that people wanted to look at, like Women & Guns magazine. The challenge was that [...]

felipe carrillo: a mild goose chase

 
She’s Mayan. Her face, and the face of her child, are variations on the iconography in Mayan glyphs. She’s in a factory - some raw materials are being processed. I’m not sure what’s in her basket, but political posters are on the wall: Viva Felipe Carrillo, perhaps something about a Mayan cooperative, and one other [...]

bound

From some point after its incoporation to the early 80s, the Library Association of Portland, which later became Multnomah County Library, operated its own bindery. Besides visually and texturally uniting runs of periodicals and sets of reference books on the shelves, the bindery, together with the mending department, breathed new life into well-read books.
Some of [...]

The Case for Books

Uh-oh, look at that cover.

It’s a meta-book, about books, and the title promises to make an argument for why they are important in the present age. Judging a book by it’s cover, I’d say we are going to talk about books that are plugged in - based on the white cords, perhaps an Apple Tablet, [...]

too long for a tweet

a problem with hypertext as a media is that pieces of it tend to disappear. linear documents may disappear but by in large, when present, they remain whole.
this is a problem for libraries and for commercial publishers. for content creators and consumers, is it a boon?

More books about books

The book I’m almost finished with now is Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain by Maryanne Wolf. Wolf is a neuroscientist who studies dyslexia, which she says is catch-all phrase for problems learning to read.
I’m not terribly impressed with it - the opening chapters make weak and culturally [...]

mobots4lib

One thing can lead to another, and it usually does. My last aside questioned David Weinberger’s quote in American Libraries that humans are hard-wired to externalize knowledge (e.g. writing), and suggested that it must have a social basis instead. I wanted to learn more and began reading Being there: putting rain, body, and world together [...]